Paper short abstract:

The transition from joke-telling rounds to sharing humor digitally marks an important shift in the oral vs written dichotomy of family communication. Reducing jokes to written texts challenges the key notions of family humorous discourse and requires new approaches to the study of family traditions.

Paper long abstract:

The oral tradition of joke-telling flourished in Belarus (and many other countries) throughout the 20th century. One of the practices associated with it were joke-telling rounds that were mostly performed among family or friends. During such rounds, jokes were often decontextualised and enjoyed as stand-alone humorous texts, their funniness being subject exclusively to their verbal features and narrators' skills.

An oral joke cannot be reduced to a written text due to the non-verbal aspects involved in its performance (Norrick 2004); however, globalisation and the spread of information technologies contributed to a wide circulation of jokes in the form of written texts. This has also affected the traditions of family joke-telling. This primarily involves the practices of joke sharing. When I conducted fieldwork on Belarusian family humour in 2016-2017, many of my interviewees stated that they often read jokes out loud rather than told them orally to their family members. Many of the younger interviewees said that they preferred sharing jokes digitally (even when both family members are in the same room), although they did remember participating in joke-telling rounds as children.

Stripping oral jokes of the performative aspect and reducing them to written texts does not only affect the mechanisms of humour transmission, but has also an effect on the understanding of the humorous aspect of family communication. The changing emic notions of "joke" and "family humorous traditions" of the 21st century require new approaches to data collection and analysis.